|
|
| |
|
 Customer Quote
"The fact that you can collect, analyze and act on all this information, 50,000 to 60,000 parameters for every server, all in one location... This is a must-have tool for a company our size."
 - Jesper Buhl
Systems Specialist
|
|
| |
|
|
|
IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)
ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) is an integrated set of best-practice recommendations with common definitions and terminology. ITIL covers areas such as Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, Release Management and the Service Desk and is the most widely accepted service management framework of its kind.
ITIL
At the core of ITIL is enterprise configuration management, supported by a robust and detailed Configuration Management Database (CMDB) which holds the relationships between all system components including incidents, problems, known errors, changes and releases. It also contains information about employees, locations, suppliers and business units.
The broad variety of potential uses of an ITIL Reference CMDB requires that any comprehensive implementation will be based on a federated model, drawing configuration management information about processes, roles, participants, assets and status from a number of sources. ECM's CMDB makes available critical, detailed technical control information, not available in the ITIL CMDB, but necessary to make IT processes more effective and efficient.
  ECM's CMDB and ITIL
ECM's direct focus on robust system/configuration discovery and assessment supports finding, understanding and correcting configuration change that occurs even outside of established change control processes. ECM's capability extends to discovering systems procured and managed outside of established procedure, making ECM one of the most effective tools on the market for identifying and reigning in "shadow IT" footprint.
ECM's CMDB provides significant design differences that result in highly complementary ITIL CMDB capabilities:
- The ECM CMDB is designed to capture comprehensive configuration detail, collecting up to 80,000 configuration data elements from production servers.
- The ECM CMDB is designed to accommodate unanticipated emerging configuration data elements that result from deployment of new technologies/software versions, out of band configuration change and emergent vulnerability/exploit signatures.
- The ECM CMDB exposes configuration dependencies between systems.
- The ECM CMDB supports multiple technical controls compliance assessments against configuration information, collected once from mission critical systems.
- The ECM CMDB supports access to detailed configuration information, even when the monitored system becomes unavailable.
- The ECM CMDB supports the core ITIL areas of Configuration Management, Change, and Problem Management.
ECM's comprehensive configuration discovery and assessment capabilities allow you to rein-in in configuration shift & drift and shadow IT installations, bringing formerly rogue assets into the ITIL process fold. ECM's ability to expose configuration change at the most granular levels is a capability that directly complements the function and intent of ITIL's CMDB Reference Model, providing the potential to make ITIL compliant processes both more effective and more efficient. Finally, by providing Configuration Intelligence™ that highlights the differences between what you expect and what is actually deployed, extends the benefit of best practice based management to the real world enterprise, even in the face of unplanned and out of band configuration change.
Please select your area of immediate need in terms of enhancing your processes:
Organizations adopting IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) often seek to maximize the quality of IT services and the strategic business value of IT. At the same time, immediate cost reductions and increased IT efficiencies can be realized through leveraging ECM while implementing ITIL. The use of ECM in tandem with the most widely used best practice framework for IT Service Management (ITIL), helps accelerate near term business benefits by contributing value in the following areas:
- Security
- Operational Efficiency
- Compliance
- Patch Management
- Audit
- Change Management
 Change Management
Change Management ensures that standardized methods are used for efficient and prompt handling of all Changes.
Through ECM, the ITIL organization is empowered to optimize configurations and processes through the visibility into change, both planned and unplanned. Detecting configurations that result in high support costs as well as identifying opportunities to adopt best practice-based processes across the organization will provide for dual advantage (e.g. cost reductions and improved service quality). Only upon being able to measure processes and analyze Configuration Items participating in the process, will an organization adapt to create improved service management.
ECM supports all phases of change management (both routine changes and major infrastructure changes) and ensures minimum disruptions. In particular, ECM provides capabilities for change coordination, planning, pre-validation, execution tracking, validation, auditing and reporting.
Change Management discipline is paramount in scaling an IT practice. ECM is the only scalable, cross-platform solution that automates system configuration planning, reporting and remediation across Windows, Linux and UNIX platforms. For more information review the Change Management portion of ECM Solutions. A capacity to implement closed-loop change and configuration management also helps to accelerate ITIL initiatives.
 ECM Features
- Change assessment and planning
- Change execution tracking
- Change validation – when change is implemented in the defined process
- Change summary reporting
- Change auditing (Who made the change? What was changed? When was the change made?)
- Change rollback
ECM Business Value
- Reduces change operations
- Improves validation of change efficiency
- Eliminates change-related errors
- Improves visibility and coordination across groups responsible for change
Server Configuration Management
Configuration Management provides for the common goal of a logical model of the IT Infrastructure by identifying, controlling, maintaining and verifying the versions of all Configuration Items in existence.
ECM captures and maintains full configuration information on Configuration Items, across the enterprise and cross-platform. ECM tracks any change to the status of each component, and continuously analyzes the impact of configuration changes against best practices, including corporate and regulatory policies.
This goal, given planned changes occurring in accordance with Change Management and the added complexity of unplanned changes taking place outside the process enhancements being made through ITIL, causes pain for many organizations. This pain manifests itself through rising IT costs and a dampening of key benefits hoped to be realized through ITIL. Minimizing the impact of unplanned change on application availability and performance is key to providing for process stability through ITIL best practices.
 ECM Features
- Enterprise-wide CI visibility
- Planning of configuration actions
- Tracks planned and unplanned changes
- Comprehensive, Federated, Extendable CMDB
ECM Business Value
- Removes cost in manual upkeep of ITIL CMDB
- Improves coordination and visibility between process teams
- Reduces spreadsheet-based, manual processes supporting ITIL
- Drastically improves efficiencies of ITIL processes
- Reduces risk of errors
Problem Management
Problem Management is meant to minimize the adverse effect on the business of Incidents and Problems caused by errors in the infrastructure, and to proactively prevent the occurrence of Incidents, Problems and errors.
ECM allows the organization leveraging the ITIL Framework to readily troubleshoot problems in infrastructures through deterministic root-cause analysis. Ultimately this predictive capacity will impact the organization’s ability to deal with planned changes. Configuration Items in the enterprise will be continuously changing, and as such, IT process automation is necessary to adapt to that change. In addition, improving and coordinating communication through ECM among ITIL project team[s] responsible for change proves invaluable as ITIL is an ongoing, multi-year effort.
ECM automatically performs impact and root-cause analysis for each configuration and security problem it detects, enabling rapid correction that often avoids application disruption. In addition to troubleshooting capabilities, ECM’s planning and simulation prevent problems from occurring. Capturing complete infrastructure change history enables ECM to analyze each problem so appropriate measures can be taken.
 ECM Features
- Problem impact analysis
- Problem root-cause analysis
- Pre-validation for preventing problems
- Problem correction tracking and validation
- Problem history in the ECM CMDB – problem summary and analysis
ECM Business Value
- Reduces problem analysis time
- Ensures for rapid response
- Reduces the occurrence of problems
- Improves problem management coordination and summary reporting
ITIL Best Practices
IT Service Management (ITSM) is a process-based discipline intended to align the delivery of IT services with the needs of the enterprise, emphasizing benefits to customers.
ECM streamlines the management of complex IT environments by discovering and facilitating fast, accurate, day-to-day changes while enabling risk-reduced ITIL implementations. Before, during and after process changes through ITIL, ECM monitors the enterprise (Configuration Items), correlating all elements and attributes of configurations against policies.
ECM's capacity to identify errors and vulnerabilities given changes to Configuration Items which occur even outside of ITIL defined processes, is central to success with ITIL. Vulnerabilities and compliance challenges require immediate attention in tandem with ITIL implementations. To that successful end, ECM records every change for both problem analysis and audit reporting required for security and regulatory compliance.
 Incident Management
ECM detects infrastructure problems, analyzes them to quickly determine and suggest appropriate corrective actions, tracks the execution of the remediation, and validates correct implementation.
Availability Management
ECM improves the availability of the infrastructure and applications supported by the infrastructure through continuous analysis and reporting that either prevents configuration related problems or rapidly detects and corrects problems.
Release Management
ECM automatically validates any new change to the environment and determines that it is authorized, correct, and consistent with the appropriate policy. Any deviations can generate alerts. Shared visibility to changes is made available through role based reporting available across IT infrastructure groups, IT audit and the business users.
If your organization is challenged with any additional areas of ITIL in terms of rapid and measurable initiatives, please contact Configuresoft or access the resources at left for a more detailed description of value delivered.
|
|
|
|
|
|